Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Nascent: Open Text Mining Interface

From Nature's blog on web technology and science comes this post on Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI):

Every now and then a scientist contacts Nature asking for a machine-readable copy if our content (i.e., the XML) to use in text-mining research. We're usually happy to oblige, but there has to be a better way for everyone concerned, not least the poor researcher, who might have to contact any number of publishers and deal with many different content formats to conduct their work. Much better, surely, to have a common format in which all publishers can issue their content for text-mining and indexing purposes.

and further

The example of RSS shows how powerful a relatively simple common standard can be when it comes to aggregating content from multiple sources (even when it's messed up as badly as RSS ;). So maybe an approach like OTMI (or a better one dreamt up by someone else) can help those who want to index and text-mine scientific and other content. Like RSS, I think publishers might also come to see this as a kind of advert for their content because it should help interested readers to discover it. And on the basis that a something is always better than nothing, it also doesn't force publishers to give away the human-readable form of their content — they can limit themselves to snippets or even just word vectors if they want to.

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